How to Identify Your Ideal Customer

Everyone that has been in business for some time will have heard of the 80/20 rule and it’s true, 20 percent of your customers will generate 80 percent of your income. What most people don’t however know is why, well this is because the other eighty percent of your customers aren’t totally in line with your ideal target customer. It therefore follows that if you want to improve your income exponentially all you have to do is hyper focus on your ideal target customer so that you can attract more of these customers and fewer of those that aren’t ideal.

What Benefits Does Your Product or Service Offer?

Make a list of all the benefits that your product or service has, make sure you focus on benefits and not features. By thinking like your customer, you will always think about “what’s in it for me?” Your customer wants to know why they should use that product and by listing benefits you will know.

Identify your Customer Pain Points That You Can Solve

What sort of pain points do your customers have that your product or service solve? Does it free up time? Does it end boredom? Does it… what does it do?

Determine Who Needs These Problems Solved

Once you’ve gathered a list of benefits your product offers and pain points that your product solves, you need to figure out who needs those benefits and has those pain points and it’s not as hard as you might think, because you have your existing 20 percent of customers to use as the basis to determine this.

Determine Your Customers’ Potential Characteristics

Once you have a list of those businesses who might benefit from your product or service, you can make a list of typical demographics and other factors that people in this group share.

Determine Your Target Customers’ Behavior

Find ways to research the list of people (business owners / managers whoever you typically interact with) you’ve made above so that you can get a better idea of the type of behavior your target audience displays.

What Career Does Your Ideal Customer Have?

Can you determine what type of career the decision maker at your ideal customer has from the information you’ve gathered above?

What Price Point Can They Afford?

Once you know what type of career your ideal client has, you can often determine a fair price point for your product or service based on what they can afford to pay and the value of your offering. I have to admit that I don’t do this, I work at the higher end of the market and as such I educate my clients as to what to expect and so the only inquiries I get are from people who expect to paid high but who also demand results.

Test Your Assumptions

Once you have a fair idea of who your ideal customer is, you can test your assumptions by identifying some influencers within your audience and asking them to try your product or service and by asking for feedback.

Repeat

Take the answers you get from the information above and then test and improve upon your offerings so that you can truly please your ideal customer.

Using the information learned from all of the above actions, you can truly focus your marketing efforts toward your ideal customer, you should find your marketing becomes much more effective as you now speak the language your target customers do. In addition, you can use the information to retain the right customers in order to take advantage of repeat business and a higher level of customer satisfaction.

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